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In Reply to: Re: Very insulting posted by susie on March 11, 2005 at 20:17:23:
It's easy to bash Shulamite for her religious preoccupations, because they do tend toward "inappropriate, distancing response to immediate question about the physical status of her daughter."
The quote marks mean you're looking at the kind of language used in clinical notes associated with biopsychosocial assessments.
My view is that Mene was dealt a pretty tough hand to play from a stacked deck. The Bergs (of all people) have characterized Shulamite as mentally and emotionally unstable. This is a woman who produced a child with a man (Aaron) who reportedly has a confirmed diagnoses of schizophrenia.
You have talked about the trauma you experienced trying to recover your own child(ren) from Family abductors. Try to imagine your feelings of powerlessness if the abductors had been the Berg family. It's one freakin' kick in the head to make a baby with a schizophrenic man who commits suicide and then have a borderline like Eve abduct your baby because you've talked too much about the family secrets.
I'm sure I could come up with some educated guesses about Shulamith's psychiatric diagnosis. In lieu of that ego-driven exercise in labeling someone else, I'll share my own psychiatric labels: Major Depressive Disorder with hypomanic features, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with Chemical Dependency.
The reason I share this information about my own mental/emotional instability is to point out a simple fact: most of us have shit going on in our heads that stinks.
I've concluded that Shulamith is probably a "good enough parent," even if she doesn't know how to communicate her daughter's needs in response to a (probably) hysteric inquiry from Anneke about the original concerns Oldtimer raised about Mene.
It may be impossible for Shulamith to say, "Mene is a crackhead turning tricks on the lower East Side," because that statement just doesn't make sense to her. What appears to make sense to Mom is a certain kind of theology about demonic oppression. The way I see it, that's how Mom constructs the meaning of what I would call "mentally ill, substancing abusing victim of ritualized, cultic sex abuse and pervasive domestic violence."
From my perspective, this is a matter of cross-cultural competency. Mene & Shula come from the Berg world, a place of serious inbreeding by generations of people with religious preoccupations and emotional instability. Aunt Deborah, who cared for Mene in late adolescence, also inhabits that bizaarly over-spiritualized world. Just thank the bright ones that you don't.
